When will hotly contested NY mayoral field make mincemeat of Weiner’s statements denying occupation?

This video from a tipster was published by Ali Gharib today, and said to have been shot outside Stonewall in New York during celebration of Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage yesterday. In it Weiner says “Yes,” when asked if he still believes that the West Bank is not occupied.

Then he tries to fudge by saying that “there are disagreements” about what constitutes the West Bank. So the Palestinians should be happy in bantustans.

Three years ago Anthony Weiner argued, absurdly, at the New School that the West Bank was not occupied. The New York Times’s Roger Cohen contested the claim, but Weiner kept doubling down on it.

Weiner is now the frontrunner in the Democratic primary race to be mayor of New York. I can’t wait for those good liberals Christine Quinn, William Thompson Jr., Bill de Blasio, and John Liu to condemn Weiner’s comments. How long will I have to wait?

PS. Weiner and his family are living in a Park Avenue apartment owned by a man whose “only agenda” is Israel. Some have speculated it’s a sweetheart deal; Weiner denies it. This is sure to become another hot potato in the hotly-contested New York mayoral race!

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Well, if it’s not an occupation, then it’s all one state. If that is the case, then the next question posed to the Perv should be whether he supports granting all Palestinians in the West Bank the vote and all rights that the Jews have or whether he supports pro-Jewish Apartheid.

If these people (like the Perv Weiner, as you noted!) want to absurdly try to “deny” the reality of the entirely illegal (http://imeu.net/news/article0016642.shtml) occupation; they are actually de-facto admitting to the reality of Israeli apartheid.

As the only attempted “defense” against the accurate label of apartheid for the situation (that is occasionally trotted forward by some of the slightly more “savvy” Zionist propagandists and hasbara agents) is that there is allegedly not direct or full apartheid in Israel itself (some of these people will even occasionally acknowledge some of the massive amounts of institutionalized discrimination that Palestinian Israelis face in Israel itself, etc.) and that the occupied territories are of course not legally part of Israel and as such the Israeli regime is merely maintaining an occupation regime allegedly “only until” a political settlement (aka the two-state solution) will come about.

I believe this is the style of argument that is advanced by say Peter Beinart, who does actually call for BDS against the Israeli settlements; but then adds on top of this a “call” to then “invest more” in Israel itself. Showing he clearly doesn’t care about the apartheid nature of Zionism as an ideology itself.

You’re exactly right. The amount of hair splitting invovled by the supporters of this state is astounding. But ultimately you either have principles or you don’t have principles. If you aren’t willing to be harsh and inflexible when it comes to pass that your own group, however that’s defined, commits the crimes, then you don’t have principles. Beinart’s attempt to justify his conflicting feelings of zionism on the one hand and liberalism on the other must fail, as he himself admits that if push came to shove, he’d jettison his principles, thus showing that he actually doesn’t have principles. (And the position you highlight demonstrates that he doesn’t even need to wait for push to come to shove; he’s willing to jettison his principles preemptively, so as to prevent people from feeling bad about him.)

Don’t count on Quinn to do anything of the sort. She’s already a bought-and-paid for shill for all demands Israeli, no matter how blatantly preposterous.

Have your already forgotten her “plea,” of but a few months earlier, for the release of Israeli spy Jonathan Jay Pollard [an issue of really momentous importance to the chief executive of NYC]? No doubt all Gothamites lose sleep over that issue.

Reporter: does the near collapse of public services and a practically third-world infrastructure in NYC concern you in the least?

[Would be] Mayor Quinn; not while poor, oppressed JJ Pollard is imprisioned unjustly by an anti-Semetic and vindictive federal government.

Citizen- Huma Abedin is not Arab ethnically. She is a Muslim. Both of her parents came from the subcontinent, her father from India and her mother from Pakistan. Born in the US, she did spend most of her pre college years in Saudi Arabia, where her parents moved when she was two. I suppose she might have been given Saudi Arabian citizenship which might make her Arab, but I tend to think not, because the Saudis don’t hand out citizenship to immigrants too readily, is my impression. Maybe if one is not ethnically Arab, but grew up in an Arab country speaking Arabic, that might make her an Arab, but I’m not sure.

The success of zionist candidates comes down to two things….one, the area they are in, where there are heavy concentrations of Jews such as NY, etc., they tend to be more pro Israel than Jews in areas with fewer Jews imo….and then there is the MONEY.

Money ‘choses the candidates’ for most, not all but most offices, so you only have a choice between several I-First candidates and several money candidates, which are usually the same..there is rarely a third choice.

Here’s a statistic that should jolt you awake like black coffee with three
shots of espresso dropped in: In the 2012 election cycle, 28 percent of all
disclosed donations—that’s $1.68 billion—came from just 31,385 people. Think
of them as the 1 percenters of the 1 percent, the elite of the elite, the
wealthiest of the wealthy.

That’s the blockbuster finding in an eye-popping new report by the Sunlight
Foundation, a nonpartisan transparency advocate. The report’s author, Lee
Drutman, calls the 1 percent of the 1 percent “an elite class that
increasingly serves as the gatekeepers of public office in the United
States.” This rarefied club of donors, Drutman found, worked in high-ranking
corporate positions (often in finance or law). They’re clustered in New York
City and Washington, DC. Most are men. You might’ve heard of some of them:
casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Texas
waste tycoon Harold Simmons, Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Those are a few of the takeaways from Sunlight’s report. Here are six more
statistics (including charts) giving you what you need to know about the
wealthy donors who dominate the political money game—and the lawmakers who
rely on them.

(1) The median donation from the 1 percent of the 1 percent was $26,584. As
the chart below shows, that’s more than half the median family income in
America.

Economic Policy Institute
(2) The 28.1 percent of total money from the 1 percent of the 1 percent is
the most in modern history. It was 21.8 percent in 2006, and 20.5 percent in
2010.

Sunlight Foundation
(3) Megadonors are very partisan. Four out of five
1-percent-of-the-1-percent donors gave all of their money to one party or
the other.

Sunlight Foundation
(4) Every single member of the House or Senate who won an election in 2012
received money from the 1 percent of the 1 percent.

(6) For the 2012 elections, winning House members raised on average $1.64
million, or about $2,250 per day, during the two-year cycle. The average
winning senator raised even more: $10.3 million, or $14,125 per day.

(6) Of the 435 House members elected last year, 372—more than 85
percent—received more from the 1 percent of the 1 percent than they did from
every single small donor combined.

Sunlight Foundation
So what are we to make of the rise of the 1 percent of the 1 percent?
Drutman makes a point similar to what I reported in my recent profile of
Democratic kingmaker Jeffrey Katzenberg: We’re living in an era when
megadonors exert control over who runs for office, who gets elected, and
what politicians say and do. “And in an era of unlimited campaign
contributions,” Drutman writes, “the power of the 1 percent of the 1 percent
only stands to grow with each passing year.”

“the power of the 1 percent of the 1 percent only stands to grow with each passing year.

This is a clear cut reality. It is only getting worse as the system is more corrupted.
These hidden kingmakers, can not only choose their horses for the lead, but they
have teams set out to destroy the competition.

I guess Bloomberg decided to try the other route. He’d pay for his election and reelections as a billionaire and change the laws to reelect himself. I’m not sure which model is worse, the hidden kingmaker or the corporate billionaire?

Lol. I can’t believe this guy is in the lead.
Phil, do you still believe in the Weiner you once,
wrote about. His commitment to left wing causes,
his passionate speeches uptown?

After watching that debate with Brian Baird, I
realized what a broken man he is. Zionists will
never know what integrity is – not possible.

The political contenders need to collaborate to
knock Weiner out. Make some jokes during the
debate about ‘balls’ with a straight face. Get him
hot. We’ve seen him lose his temper when Roger
Cohen asked him about the West Bank. Please,
save nyc from this creep taking office.

Hello? Is there anyone home in the headline writing department? Should be: “When will Crowded Mayor Field Outdo Weiner in Crazy Blind Pro-Israeli Statements?” Of course, no “Serious” contender would take him on here, they’d agree with him and try to outdo him.

[EXCERPT] . . . Gustave Le Bon, a pioneer of mass psychology, once noted that the masses are especially susceptible to comforting fantasies, and that, “Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” . . .

ALSO SEE: “Who may resist (or, ‘Do you see any smokestacks?’)”, by Ilene Cohen, Mondoweiss, 4/05/13

[EXCERPTS] . . . Colonial powers do not acknowledge that there’s anything wrong with what they’re doing; indeed, they defend their actions as legal and just. Thus, it is the resistance that is the crime. . .. . . Regarding today’s Israel, ask the members of Netanyahu’s coalition; ask the members of AIPAC; ask lots of even well meaning American Jews. They’ll insist that Israel, (the unacknowledged) colonial occupier, is the victim and that those who resist must be punished, lest the phenomenon (of resistance to illegal occupation) spread.. . . It breaks down to whether you support the occupation by justifying it and calling it something else or whether you believe that the occupation must end (and ending the occupation, as they well know, would entail a lot of decolonizing).Amira Hass has the heart of a lion. She stands apart for her decades-long struggle as a journalist to expose the ugly, suppressed truth about the occupation and to challenge it. Read the comments that accompany her articles and you’ll see the vitriol directed at her. Yesterday she wrote about resistance: “Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance. . .”. . . It [Hass’ article] has generated the virulent response one would expect, with settlers accusing Haaretz of being anti-settler. . .
. . . There is an aversion in Israel to admitting that there is even an occupation (they still babble about “disputed” territories, not occupied territories). But as of June this oppressive occupation will have been running for forty-six years. . .. . . My parents moved to Israel in the late 1970s. My father and I argued vehemently and nonstop about the matter of Palestinians, a Palestinian state, the occupation, and the wars from even earlier, from the mid-1970s until his death four years ago. It was he who, really irritated with something I’d said, countered with, “Do you see any smokestacks?” Meaning that until there are gas chambers and ovens, there’s nothing to discuss: for him, Palestinians were simply barbaric terrorists. End of story. What a paltry standard of (in)justice it is that allows the prism of the Holocaust to distort everything. I saw my father, whom I loved very much, as a typical Israeli (or, perhaps, he was simply a typical American Jew).
It has become the thing in Israel today to crow about how “quiet” things are in the occupied territories—they boast that there’s no terror even as they exploit talk of terror all the time. In 2012, they tell you, no Israelis were killed at the hands of Palestinians. By contrast, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, the IDF has already killed eleven Palestinians in 2013. The campaign talk in Israel a few months back was about how it was unnecessary to even think about Palestine: the natives, that is, were not restless. . .

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